On what was not too long ago a busy commercial street a block away from us, practically every storefront is now boarded-up. Food stores, restaurants, furniture store, dress store, beauty salon, camera store, sporting goods store, video shop, all gone over the past few years -- that last one taken over by a spiritualist/tarot reader. The movie theatre is shuttered and about to give way to an unmanned A.T. & T. wireless receiving station. The grocery store went bankrupt last week.

The ghostly view from the bus at night or from the streets at night is very 1937.

Yet there remain and flourish pockets of extreme wealth and privilege. Just last week a very famous restaurant celebrated its fortieth anniversary and it was a three-day spectacle of display of the very rich and well-connected.

The abyss between the few and the many is vast. Who knows what may be lurking in its yawning shadows.

Tom, thanks for these and the words. Don't know if you ever checked out an L.A. version of efo's work called East of West L.A. by the underrated and overlooked poet but fortunately getting noticed photographer Kevin McCollister. Well worth it for similarly photographic epiphanies.

I woke up and decided to "be up" (rather than up and unfocused) early to "catch up" and caught this or, as they say, it caught me. It's a remarkable, resonant assemblage of words and images. It's hard to believe they ever lived apart from each other and it seems foolish and pointless to try to pull them apart now that they’re together. What this makes me think about more than anything else is the time early in my career when I worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn and I sometimes journeyed away from the office to conduct hospital arraignments (if the defendant was in the hospital) and hospital hearings (if the plaintiff had been hospitalized). My fellow travelers constituted a portable entire criminal justice system (prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, court officer, court reporter, policeman) and we drove into parts of the enormous Brooklyn landscape that were completely unrecorded in and outside of New York Times’ history. I was disappointed in my career at that point and regarded so much of my life as a dream that I hoped would pass away soon, so I tended to regard those Brooklyn dreamscapes as passing also and haven’t given them much waking thought until now when I see their shapes again here. As I’ve mentioned before, the drive along Philadelphia’s “Main Line” from Lancaster Avenue into Center City, i.e, from prestigious suburbs into the heart of Philadelphia, affords contemporary views similar to efo’s . These are new and the result of the last four years’ declines . My blood boils, but I know a lot of people feel this way. And others “feel no way.”

Bail bondsmen have plenty of business these days. In this region homelessness and violent crime have accelerated in proportion with the dramatic increase in public evidence of attenuation (and quite possibly imminent collapse) in what was once over-confidently termed the "social fabric". Last year, in the course of attempting to navigate these harrowing night streets, in these ever more scarifying times, I encountered, very much by accident (are there any other kind of public encounters, any more?) an extremely dubious-appearing fellow who related, surprisingly and apropos of absolutely nothing, that he had just been certified as... no, not a postmodernist... a bail bondsman. "It's a growth industry," he said. And then explained that his real profession was peddling drugs (he avowed that he had legal credentials for this), and that, being a homeless serial offender sans portfolio at present, he was living in a truck which had been supplied to him by the bail bond agency, for the purpose of rounding up and entrapping bail-bolting fugitives. Then he flashed his bondsman's license, and smiled, "with this, the law can't touch me now". I was reminded of Elvis, with his federal agent's credential.

Very, very weird times. Almost enough to make one "get religion".

Conrad and Michael, many thanks for the tips re. those interesting urban artists. Dark horror galore to explore, any more.

(Ed, where is old Dusty-whosky now that in our hour of great endarkenment we most need his narrative illuminations?)

Yes, down there on San Pablo boarded up stuff (your account rings all too true), up there on Shattuck ultra chez chez Chez (with the rich and famous I'm sure, sure was celebrated all over the radio (Fresh Air, Forum) where I get most of my 'news' such as it is. . . .Meanwhile, out here encased in a bubble of fog in which none of what Efo has pictured is in 'evidence' --

Steve, Bolinas remains so beautiful in my memory, and in your poems, that fog can and did and always will only make it more itself, that is, more beautiful. No urban blight, anyhow. (A blight of multi-millionaires? best cloaked in the fog?)

Yes, "no urban blight, anyhow" -- some "multi-millionaires" (they say), and no where to park downtown on most weekends (especially if the swell is up (as it's been these last few days -- cars and people whether there's fog or not). . . .